Mississippi Republican Rep. Michael Guest is fighting to keep his seat partly because he voted to establish a congressional committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, another sign that incumbents who don’t take the hard line position that the 2020 election was invalid could find themselves struggling to survive primary elections.
Guest, who is running for his third term, faced a primary challenge from Michael Cassidy, a former Navy pilot, who centered his campaign around the notion that Guest was not conservative enough for deep-red Mississippi. Cassidy narrowly beat Guest in Tuesday’s primary, but neither received more than 50 percent of the vote, forcing them into a head-to-head runoff on June 28.
Cassidy is among several Republicans prevailing in primary elections this year who have continued to spread false claims that the 2020 election results were stolen from former president Donald Trump. In Ohio, J.R. Majewski, who attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally and who has ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, beat out three Republicans in a congressional primary. In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, who also attended the rally of election deniers on the National Mall, won the state’s gubernatorial primary.
Guest was among the 147 Republicans who, after the Jan. 6 attack, voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. A month later he signed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the 2020 results. Most recently, he co-sponsored the “...
PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar instructed officials to prepare a defamation lawsuit against "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published" on Israel. Israel wi...